Five thousand people have crossed the Channel in dinghies since January. We're not even through February.

Do the maths. If it carries on like this, 2026 will blow past the 2024 record of 36,816. That was supposed to be the peak. It wasn't.

Remember "smash the gangs"? Labour's big answer to the boats? Number of major smuggling kingpins convicted so far: zero. Not one. The gangs are doing fine. Business is booming, in fact.

Border Force morale is shot. Officers say they feel like they're running a ferry service, not a border. Process them, move them on, repeat. Eight million quid a day on asylum hotels. Every day. That's what this is costing.

You could build a new hospital every month for that money. You could hire 10,000 nurses. You could fix every pothole in Kent. Instead it goes on Holiday Inns in Rotherham and converted barracks in Essex.

Down in Dover, nobody's surprised anymore. Dave Morrison's lived there 58 years. "Every government says they'll stop it," he told us. "Nothing changes. Gets worse every year, if anything."

Farage called it "the greatest policy failure in modern British history."

Hard to argue with that. Nobody even tries anymore. The government's strategy appears to be: ignore it until the media moves on, then act surprised when the next set of numbers comes out.

The boats will cross again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that.